“It’s him,” he whispered.
I could see his tears glistening, even in the darkness.
“He wants me to follow him into the dark place, but I don’t want to go. I’m going to tell him to go away. I’m going to tell him to go away forever.”
With that, he turned and ran from the room. I jumped from my bed and followed him, calling to him to stop, but he was already racing down the stairs. Before my foot even hit the first step, he had entered the living room, following the sound of the piano, and seconds later I heard his voice raised.
“Go away! You have to leave me alone. I won’t go with you. You don’t belong here!”
And a second voice answered. It said: “This is my place, and you’ll do as I tell you to do.”
When I reached the bottom of the stairs, there was a boy seated on the piano stool. David was right: he looked somewhat like Jason, as though someone had been given a fleeting description of my lost son and had constructed an imperfect imitation on that basis. But all of the good in Jason, all of the brightness, was gone from this being. Instead, there was only the shell of a boy who might once have been mine, and something dark moved inside it. He wore the same yellow T-shirt and shorts that Jason had been wearing on the day he died, except they didn’t fit quite right. They looked too tight, and there was dirt and blood on them.
And the voice wasn’t a child’s voice. It spoke in a man’s tone, deep and threatening. It sounded obscene, coming out of this small figure. It said: “Play with me, David. Come, sit beside me. Help me finish my song, then I’ll show you my special place, my dark place. Do as I tell you, now. Come to me and we can play together forever.”
I stepped into the room, and the child looked at me. As it did so, it changed, as if by distracting it I had somehow broken its concentration. It was no longer a boy. It was no longer anything human. It was old and stooped and decayed, with a balding skull and pinched white skin. The shreds of a dark suit hung on what was left of its body and its eyes were black and lusting. It raised its fingers to its lips and licked the tips.
“This is my place,” it said. “The children come to me. Suffer the children that come unto me…”
I grabbed David and pushed him behind me, back into the hallway. I could hear him crying.
The thing smiled at me, and it touched itself as it did so, and I knew what I had to do.
There was a sledgehammer in the hallway. Harris had left it there, along with other tools that he planned to take away at a later time. I reached for the sledgehammer, my eyes never leaving the thing on the piano stool. It was already fading away when I took the first swing, and I saw the hammer pass through it as it hit the piano. I struck at the wood and ivory, again and again and again, screaming and howling as I did so. I kept swinging the hammer until most of the piano lay in pieces on the ground. Then I took the remains outside and, in the darkness, I set them alight. David helped me. We stood side by side and we watched it turn to ash and blackened wood.
And I thought, at one point, that I saw a figure writhing in the flames, a man in a dark suit slowly burning in the night air, until at last he was dispersed by the wind.
Now it is I who have the nightmares, and I who lie awake listening in the dead of night. I hate the silence, but more than that I fear what may disturb it. In my dreams I see a thing in a ragged suit luring children into dark places, and I hear the sound of nocturnes playing. I call to the children. I try to stop them. Sometimes Frank Harris is with me, for we share these dreams together, and we try to warn the little ones. Mostly they listen to us, but sometimes the music plays, and a little boy invites them to play a game.
And they follow him into the darkness.
The Wakeford Abyss
The two men stared down into the void below. Behind them, the sun was slowly rising, a counterpoint to the journey that they were about to undertake. Larks called, but the sound of them seemed to come from far away. Here, among these desolate hills, no birds flew. The only sign of life that they had encountered upon their ascent was a single goat that had somehow found itself alone on the side of Bledstone Hill and was now making a concerted effort to rejoin its fellows in more hospitable surroundings. They could still see it moving gingerly among the rocks and scree when they turned toward the sun. Sure-footed as it was, it seemed to evince a distrust of the ground beneath its feet, and with good cause: both of the men had taken nasty tumbles on their approach, and Molton, the older and stouter of the two, had lost his compass during one particularly painful fall.
It was Molton who now removed his cap and, holding it firmly by the brim, began to fan himself gently.
“Feels like it’s going be a hot one,” he said.
From where they stood, they could see green fields and stone walls slowly emerging from the night’s gloom as the light rose. The distant spire of Wakeford’s only church was revealed to them, surrounded by the small redbrick houses of its worshippers. Soon there would be people moving, and the noise of carts upon its narrow streets, but for now the village was still. Molton, who was born and raised in London and considered himself very much the city gent, wondered how anyone could live in such a place. It was too quiet for him, too provincial, and without any of the distractions on which he depended for his amusement.
A bleating noise came to him, and he shielded his eyes as he attempted to assess the goat’s progress. He saw it poised on a small rock, testing the ground ahead with its hoof. Each time it tried to place its weight down, shingle slid away, raising dust as it went.
“Poor beggar,” said Molton. “He’ll be hungry soon.”
He tugged at his mustaches and, finding them colonized by small pieces of grit, began to clean them with a small comb.
The other man did not take his eyes from the maw at their feet. He was smaller than Molton by about six inches, and his face was clean shaven but, like his companion, his bearing betrayed his military origins. His name was Clements, and it was largely at his instigation that the two men had made their way to Wakeford. Both had some experience of climbing, mainly in the Alps, but it was Clements who had suggested that those skills might serve them just as well below ground as above.
“Who’s a poor beggar?” asked Clements.
“The goat,” said Molton. “Looks as if he’s stuck up here.”
“He’ll find his way down. They always do.”
Molton looked doubtful. He had always been the more cautious of the two men, and sedentary by nature, at least when compared with Clements’s more robust approach to life. Nevertheless, the two men had found a common bond in their fascination with ascents and descents, a bond strengthened by their shared belief in the value of a good, strong rope.
The skills required by mountaineers, and the equipment they used, had advanced little in three hundred years of climbing. A stout alpenstock was essential, while the continentals also favored crampons. Britons, Clements and Molton among them, eschewed crampons in favor of two rows of triple-headed tacks in the soles of their boots, but most parties agreed that ropes simply weren’t the sort of thing that a gentleman ought to be using. They were considered vaguely unmanly, as well as potentially dangerous.
Clements and Molton had become believers in the merits of rope following an encounter with the legendary Irish scientist and climber John Tyndall in London some years earlier. In 1858, Tyndall had successfully completed his first solo ascent of Monte Rosa without the aid of guides, porters, or provisions, and with only a ham sandwich and a bottle of tea to sustain him. Only the most foolhardy of critics would dare to impugn the bravery of such a man. In 1860, he had aroused considerable controversy when he ascribed the blame for the deaths of two Englishmen and a guide on the Alpine slope of Col du Geant to inadequate use of ropes. Clements and Molton had read Tyndall’s letter to The Times concerning the accident, and the correspondence that quickly followed. When, in the spring of 1861, Tyndall invited the Alpine climber and guide, Auguste Balmat, to speak at the British Museum, the two men were in attendance, and later enjoyed a supper with Tyndall. By the time he was finished with them, it was all that they could do not to seek out the nearest rope maker and set him to work on miles of stout line.